Hi Folks. New here and thought I'd share my recent experience of putting my home movies on DVD.
Being a little new to all this I "played " with a lot of software, free trials Galore !!.
Finally settled on DVio to transfer (capture ?) to PC . TMPGEnc 3.0 express to encode and Tsunami DVD author to burn DVD.
TMPGEnc 3.0 is an absolute joy to use and for me, the BIG surprise was I can transfer my Pal video to Pc, put the resulting AVI into TMPGEnc 3.0 EXP., Choose output as NTSC (mpeg-2) and my final disc will play in my "whiny" Sony that will reject anything that's not Region 1 Ntsc.
The trial version I used of the original TMPGEnc PLus ,also did the task, but playback with motion, had jerky/stuttering moments. With the new 3.0 express I bought , it looks perfect. Did not have to fiddle with anything, frame rate/sound etc.
It almost seems to good to be true,--Pal To Ntsc so simply ??

It's not technically very hard to convert digital formats from PAL to NTSC or vice-versa (the software just needs to know how to handle the fields properly). But you do lose a bit of motion fluidity and you do lose resolution, so it's usually best to keep the video in its original format (virtually all players these days can read both formats).

Thanks rmn. Yes, I would prefer to just leave everything in Pal, but I do have two Sony (AVDs500ES and the AVDS50ES) that will not play Pal.---Thankfully, I have a Phlips(also labeled Region 1) which will play everything.

PAL is 720x576 at 50 fields per second. NTSC is 720x480 at 59.94 fields per second. Then there are some issues with 24-fps DVDs with the pulldown flag, and support for MPEG audio (which is mandatory on PAL players but not on NTSC players), but the first two issues are the most important ones.

There is no "country coding"; you're probably thinking about region coding, but that is independent from the video format (ex., a region 1 DVD can be PAL or NTSC).